Tag Archives: Graffiti

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Washington DC

Model Shoot, Georgetown – the Film Edition, “Nuclear Age”

October 25, 2014 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

While we were out scouting a location, Grayson saw this bit of graffiti and said, “I want my picture taken next to a sign that says, ‘Nuclear Age Sucks Shit’. The colors were cool, the message edgy, and the model was inspired, so who was I to say no? I’m going to keep it on my list of places to shoot.

The Anarchy symbol made for a kind of halo in purple for Grayson.

In this case, the diffuser wasn’t big enough to soften the light on the whole scene, and the hard-edged shadow on the wall made perfect sense given the message of the mural – the shadows recall the kind of shadows cast by the blast of a nuclear weapon.

In this last shot, I moved in tight to get the golden mushroom stenciled on the wall. It just seemed a fitting counterpart to the rest of the graffiti.

Again, all shots were taken on Kodak Ektar 100 in my Rolleiflex. It gives punchy saturation when you need it without being over-the-top.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Toronto Urban Grit

September 13, 2014 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

Some random finds from around the urban center of Toronto. These were in the area of King and Queen Streets, between Bathurst and Spadina for the most part.

The first three were found on Queen Street. Queen Street is a bit rougher around the edges, but in a kind of hipster/grunge way. It looks worse than it is – I ran into a panhandling junkie getting set up for the morning, baby-sitting his friend’s Rottweiler puppy. We had a great chat about my Rolleiflex, he didn’t even ask me for money, and the Rotty came over to me of her own free will, licked my hand, and rubbed up against my legs. That’s pretty emblematic for how friendly Toronto is – even the panhandler’s dog is nice.

I think it’s the wildest coolest thing that a dive bar would decorate their wall with a mural of a face, smoking and talking on the phone, and giant
insect sculptures crawling over the upper floors. It makes me actually want to go in and find out what’s so special about the place – I bet they have some really funky live music.

Isn’t this a terrific cultural contrast? Poutine next door to Falafel. About the only way you could outdo that is to put a Kosher deli next door to a Carolina Pulled Pork shop. But it wouldn’t surprise me if such a juxtaposition existed somewhere in Toronto.

Over on King Street, we’re getting a bit more upscale with this pan-asian restaurant. This stretch of King was where all the beautiful people attending TIFF were hanging out.

Perfect Leather looks sketchy on the outside, but from what I could see through their windows, this looks to be THE place to shop for leathers and fabrics if you’re in the garment trade in Toronto.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Wide or Tight? You decide – Toronto Graffiti

September 13, 2014 dcphotoartist 3 Comments

Two versions of the same scene- which do you think works better?

I’m still on the fence – the wide shot has that extra splash of color from the door on the next building, and the visually leading lines, but the tight shot pulls your attention to the sign.

Black and White, Cameras, Color, DC Cityscapes, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Neighborhood Walkabout – Graffiti

September 1, 2014 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

Another sign of change and transformation is the ebb and flow of graffiti. My latest find was this:

I loved the serendipitous juxtaposition of the advertisement wording for the cellphone repair shop and the graffiti – “Any Make, Any Model… Black is Beautiful”. There’s truth in accidents. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident.

A generic graffiti tag on a bricked-up window of a house. This is casual art, that has its own accidental grace and beauty despite not having any great aspiration beyond marking territory or gang initiation.

Then there’s graffiti that is transformed from simple defacement by virtue of adopting the form and structure of the object upon which it is inscribed, like this manhole cover.

Some street art I found in Toronto. There’s a point where graffiti transcends defacement of property and really does become art in itself.

More graffiti as street art. There is part of this wall that I intentionally cropped out as it makes a statement that I don’t know I’d want to make or pass on (decapitated nude female torso).

Back to simplicity, this bit speaks to collective identity questions – the figure transforms the Washington DC city flag of three stars over two bars into a humanoid with a hand for a head. Politics, ethnicity, religion, all rolled into a piece of temporary public art (the wall upon which this figure was painted has been gentrified into several very expensive restaurants).

The camera of record is a Rolleiflex 2.8E, and the films used are FP4+ for b/w and Kodak Ektar 100 and Portra 160 for color.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Paris in October – part 28 – The Pompidou Centre

December 9, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

The Pompidou Centre is a massive modern art and culture facility in central Paris, on the western edge of the Marais district. Its architectural claim to fame is that it was designed with all its systems (heating, cooling, plumbing, visitor circulation, etc) exposed on the outside of the building, a sort of deconstruction of the notion of architecture. This, in addition to being an interesting concept, gives it another claim to fame: being perhaps the single ugliest piece of modern civic architecture known to man. And in a world where Brutalist architecture exists, this is no mean feat. What this does do positively, however, is provide a venue in which urban street art has a genuine, appropriate, sanctioned environment in which to exist. The wild vibrant gestural organic nature of street art contrasts with the highly composed, almost abstract structure of the ventilation and exhaust pipes and the security fencing around their access points.

Street art has even been allowed to take over the stuccoed side of an existing 18th century building in what appears to be an homage to Salvador Dali.

Of course this doesn’t entirely stop unsanctioned street art or even just flat-out graffiti of a very pedestrian variety from cropping up around it. Graffiti aside, I thought this little house squeezed in between the gothic church and the later townhouse was fascinating – I could actually see setting up a small studio on the ground floor and living in the room above it.

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